Research

European Centre for Bioinformatics and Genomics has been founded as a scientific consortium whose aim is to integrate experts from different areas of genomics research. The research is conducted both on the experimental and theoretical grounds, on different levels of analysis of genomic data.

Results of research (selected)

RNApolis is a flagship of RNA bioinformatics group carrying out the
research in ECBiG. This portal collects the most important information
about computational tools dedicated to RNA analysis developed by the
group, and allows to enter them directly from one place.
http://rnapolis.pl/

RNA FRABASE is a database of RNA structures and search engine to locate 3D fragments with a specified sequence and/or secondary structure within all experimentally determined RNAs. It has already attracted 400,000 (400 thousand) returning visitors from 150 countries. By May 2017, it had achieved over 2.8 mln hits, which represents 860 workloads daily (1 session runs every two minutes).http://rnafrabase.cs.put.poznan.pl/

RNAComposer is one of the first fully automated systems for RNA 3D structure prediction and it is the fastest on the market. It is widely used for scientific as well as educational purposes. It has already gathered 10,000 (10 thousand) returning visitors and hits 56 workloads daily. By May 2017, it had been run 100,000 times.http://rnacomposer.cs.put.poznan.pl/

RNApdbee is a webserver to annotate secondary structures of knotted and unknotted RNAs. Published in 2014 (NAR), it already has 500 regular users and hit 3500 sessions from the release date.http://rnapdbee.cs.put.poznan.pl/

RNAlyzer – is standalone application devoted for comparison of RNA 3D models with the reference structure and for discrimination between the correct and incorrect models (published in NAR, 2013). Our approach is based on the idea of local neighborhood, defined as a set of atoms included in the sphere centered around a user-defined atom. A unique feature of the RNAlyzer is the simultaneous visualization of the model-reference structure distance at different accuracy levels, from the individual residues to the entire molecules based on RMSD measure.http://rnalyzer.cs.put.poznan.pl

RNAssess – is a computational server dedicated to evaluation of quality of RNA models. The server provides: (i) ranking of multiple 3D models (ii) visualization of prediction accuracy of atoms (iii) the ability to present results in an interactive way (iv) graphical interpretation of inaccurate predicted regions (v) plots that show structural regions of models predicted correctly below a certain threshold of accuracy. Server integrates a set of measures, namely RMSD, Deformation Index, Interactions Network Fidelity, P-value and Cutoff. http://rnassess.cs.put.poznan.pl

GeVaDSs - decision support system for novel Genetic Vaccine development process; an intelligent database is described where the results of immunological experiments can be stored and analysed. It was published as a result of an EU grant – Compuvac and was successfully used by immunologists working on genetic vaccines against Hepatitis C and West Nile viruses.http://gevads.cs.put.poznan.pl/

CLAIM - a new method proposed to integrate co-expression data obtained through DNA microarray analysis and protein-protein interaction network data; it was applied to Arabidopsis thaliana. The method identifies small subsets of highly interacting proteins and is able to support functional identification of complex genetic traits.

The mechanisms of RNA degradation appear as one of the most important factors influencing RNA activity. The RNA degradation process has been described in terms of bioinformatics and computer science. A formulation of a new problem, called
RNA Partial Degradation Problem (RNA PDP), has been proposed and its computational complexity proved to be strongly NP-complete. The proposed algorithm solving the problem is capable of reconstructing an RNA molecule using the results of biochemical analysis of its degradation.

To simplify and speed up the DNA sequencing process, a
pipeline of preprocessing raw data was developed; it diminishes the influence of low-quality reads. Also, a method was proposed for preliminary joining overlapping reads, which resulted in significant decreasing the cardinality of initial sets.

SphereGrinder - SphereGrinder is platform independent computational tool that allows for comprehensive quality inspection conducted between the set of predicted protein models and the reference structure. SphereGrinder has been successfully used in CASP challenge since 2010. It is implemented as an online application available for free use by all academic users.http://spheregrinder.cs.put.poznan.pl.

PSQAM server which allows to identify and visualize possible chemical/physical, folding, packing inconsistencies in order to refine analyzed protein model. It is also particularly suited to assess the applicability of the target sequence to structural template alignments, a major source of comparative modeling errors. The server combines several types of potential energies such as statistical and physics-based potentials.